How to prevent Negative SEO or How to prevent your competitors in harming your website

Some time ago one of my work colleagues left in order to go to another, much bigger Online Marketing company and at one point when we met up we started talking about how things are working for her at her new employer. And what she told me left me speechless. At my current company, we pride ourselves in being an online marketing firm which, apart from working according to white-hat SEO practices, abides by ethical and moral rules when it comes to providing services to our clients. So when I've heard that my colleague's new company was buying links by the dozens, not to their clients' websites, but to their clients' competitors' sites, I was astonished.

This is a big online marketing company I'm speaking of. So this shows you two things: 1. That you have to be very careful of what online marketing company you choose to work with, because if they have absolutely no problem in doing this, who knows what they are able to do to your own website and 2. That even if you work hard in building up your site and everything you do is 100% according to Google's Quality Guidelines, if your competitor buys tons of questionable links to your site, you can still get hurt.

Before Google Penguin people didn't really talk about negative SEO. Of course, buying links was a black-hat practice long before, but I don't believe websites were negatively influenced by these sort of practices, not in the way they are currently anyway. If you still don't quite believe in negative SEO, you should definitely check out this experiment from Tasty Placement, which shows the impact of low quality links on rankings. It will make a believer out of you.

So what is there to be done in order to prevent competitors to buy links to your website? Well, you can't really do much to prevent it, but what you can do is to implement a process through which you can catch such a  practice on time and do what you can in order to fix it. Below is a short guideline in order to help you get started (please use this before crying out for your MAA' :).

1. Monitor. In order to catch such practices you have to monitor your link profile. You could start implementing the following steps only when you notice something odd going on with you rankings or organic traffic and so on, but you should do it constantly. In any case, as you might know, there are a couple of great tools, which can help you in doing so. The main one is Google Webmaster Tools. So after you have logged on to GWT and go to the Search Traffic section to the Links to your site area, click on More to see the whole list of Who links the most. Here you will find the Download latest links button with which...you guessed it! You can download the latest links to your website :)

Now, depending on the amount of links you receive in a given time frame, you should do this periodically and not only with the sole purpose of preventing competitors in harming your website.

An additional tool you can use is Open Site Explorer. Even though you can download a similar report containing inbound links as from GWT, I like to use the Anchor Text report (unfortunately you do need a paid Moz account to have access to the complete list) and I'll tell you how I actually use it in a minute. What is important to note is that you should download this report often, as you will need a previous Anchor Text report to do the necessary comparisons later.

2. Analyze. All the tools in the world cannot help you if you don't analyze your data properly. So, the first step would be to analyze the Anchor Text report from OSE (don't worry if you don't have this one, you can still figure things out, but it could take more time than with this particular report). So if you do have the Anchor Text report you should compare it to the previous one you downloaded (this is why you have to download this report often). You should be looking for abnormal increases in a particular anchor text. Why? you ask. Because when competitors buy links they buy a bunch and I don't believe that they will take the time to "diversify" the anchor text the links will have. That way, apart from pointing paid links to your site they will also create an unbalance in your anchor text profile, which can likewise gain the disapproval of the Mighty Google.

The reason I said having the Anchor Text report might save you time, because it is much easier to spot if something odd is going on with your anchor text profile, than going directly to the next step.

So if something is not quite right with your Anchor Text report you have to take the link report you have downloaded from Google Webmaster Tools and identify any spammy links that started pointing recently to your website. Again you can use a couple of tools for this. What we have recently tried is Link Detective, which you can use to take a look at the domain and page authority of the links you uploaded, together with their type. If you notice a bunch of low authority sites (an authority under 30 for example) pointing to your site and you are more or less sure that you or your team didn't build those links, then you might have gotten a nasty present from one of your competitors.What is there to do next?

3. Act. Be prepared because a lot of work awaits you. There have been many articles on how to clean up your link profile, which are perfectly viable in this case as well, so I will not get into more details here. But, an additional thing you can do is try to identify the service which was used by your competitor. Try searching for clues on the pages you are getting harmful link juice from, for example. If you are able to identify the company, you should contact them and try to get those particular links removed.

There it is. MAA coming to the rescue when your competitor is bullying you :) Have you ever thought that your competitor could be buying paid links to your website? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below.

Taking Google Analytics With a Pinch of Salt

I just came back from the iCEEfest (Interactive Central & Eastern Europe Festival), where I had the pleasure to meet several giants of the internet. During a presentation on YouTube Advertising, one of the lovely ladies from Google asked the audience if the data provided by AdWords and Google Anlaytics are different (regarding the data which theoretically should be the same), which data set should we trust? Even if I was saying "AdWords" as loud as my comfort zone permitted, she made the following comparison: "Should you trust Google Analytics, which is a free product or AdWords for which you pay and for which we work very hard to make it as accurate as possible?". This got me thinking about the discrepancies I've noticed along the way, not only between the data offered by AdWords and Analytics, but within the Analytics data set as well.

The following two glitches stuck to mind (until now) and I wanted to share them with you, in case you have encountered the same problems, you need to know that you are not alone :)

1. Traffic coming through non-branded keywords. No one can argue with the fact that this metric is plays an important role in measuring result based SEO efforts (even though (not provided) gives us headaches almost each day). What I've noticed is the following: if you apply a filter to filter out a particular keyword form organic traffic, and than you filter only the organic visits that came through the same keyword, the sum is actually not equal to total organic traffic. Lets see an example. I took a dating site, which has not many organic visits, and excluded the keyword "date" from the organic visits:

 

After, I applied a filter to see only the visits coming through the keyword "date":

The excluding filter gave the result 662,925 visits, the including filter gave as a result 831 visits, which totals 663,756 visits, while without any filters the organic traffic is of:

You realize that the issue here is not about those 22 visits, but the higher organic traffic one site has the higher the difference. And I know that Google does not recommend using more than one filter, which in this case is not the case. If anybody can tell what I am missing please do.

2. Paid search traffic. We all know how important it is to attribute conversions to traffic channels, especially when we are investing money in paid search campaigns. This Google Analytics glitch confused me even more than the previous one. As you know you can see your PPC campaigns in 3 places in Google Analytics, that is if you connect your GA account with your Google AdWords account, under:
1. Traffic Sources -> Sources-> Search-> Paid;

2. Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Campaigns;

3. Traffic Sources - Advertising -> AdWords -> Campaigns.

It is important to note that in the following example, the business only had AdWords campaigns running and that all links pointing to the site were compiled with the help of Google's URL builder. As you can see under the Paid Search Campaigns all visits are show, although the campaign parameter came through only for a very small amount of traffic. Due to this fact only a small amount of traffic is shown under Campaigns. Where AdWords Campaigns are concerned, the 17 visits for which the campaign parameter did not come though are not shown, although the tracking platform does recognize that the source of those 17 visits is Google. So when applying filters and attributing conversions, you have to be careful and check that the whole amount of traffic is take into consideration.

What other Google Analytics glitches have you encountered? Would love to hear your stories in the comment section below :)

How to Monitor the WWW for Business Growth

I know you agree that the interaction between prospects, clients (former and actual), partners, industry leaders and even competitors is highly important, especially if the topic of discussion is your brand and your products/services. This has always been the case, but with the dawn of Web 2.0 the way Word-Of-Mouth works has changed. And with this change new daily/weekly tasks were added to the online marketer's job description. Apart from blogging and managing social media, monitoring what internauts say about your brand and other topics of interest became mandatory. Fortunately, the way we do this became easier thanks to the tools available to us now.

Why do you need web monitoring?
Before we cut to the chase it is important to recognize the benefits such a monitoring activity can have for your business. In my opinion the benefits can be separated into 2 main categories. Firstly, monitoring the web has a role in brand reputation management: where the good, the bad and the ugly of your business will come to surface. This includes you listening to what your prospects and clients are saying about you and thus getting to know them better (what motivates them, what are they actually looking for in your product/service and so on), information if used properly can benefit your business to a great extent. Secondly, when monitoring the web, opportunities may arise that might have less to do with your blogging and social marketing activities, but it can influence your public relations activities, product/service development activities and so on.

Step One - Establish Goals
The second step would be to establish your goals - as always :). Think about what you would like to achieve with this task. For Brand Reputation Management, goals that you could set could be to offer customer support on social media channels, discover customer complaints early and fix them, maybe turn unsatisfied customers into true evangelists for your brand, which leads us to building a relationship with possible brand evangelists, crisis management and so on. Discovering complementary opportunities could regard discovering possible newsjacking topics for press releases and other PR opportunities, developing a new product/service even better than the one your competitors launched and so on.

Step Two - The Tools
There are quite a couple of tools that you could use for this purpose, both free and paid.
The obvious and free tools would be Google Alerts, Social Mention and the search function from Twitter. Another tool that I like is Mention, especially because it has a free version, a desktop app and I believe it to be highly accurate.

I did notice a flaw in a couple of these tools: if you have an abbreviation for a brand name or if your brand name can be abbreviated (for example SD4M), and believe me most of your customers will shorten your brand name if they can, then some of these might give you results when that string of characters appears in unfriendly URLs, as www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrG0qV-Sd4M&feature=youtube_gdata for the previous example, which might have nothing to do with your actual brand. This might not be the case thought for notorious brands.

Another service I really like using is HARO (aka Help A Reporter Out), as it is a great way to build up relationships with journalists and maybe even be mentioned in a piece. Of course, sometimes they are looking for your customers and not you. In these cases, what I usually do is to post on our social accounts that such an opportunity is available for our fans/followers. If we do get some positive feedback from our fan base regarding that particular post, than I let the reporter who submitted the query know what we did to help and mention that if any additional help is needed we are at his/her disposal.

When looking for a tool to use, depending on your budget, remember one thing: no tool is perfect, but you do have to search for the best tool that will work for your business.

Step Three - Setting Up 
What keywords should you monitor? Here are a couple of ideas:
Brand related keywords:
- brand and company name, with all of the variations this might take
- name of your CEO
For these I would monitor every result possible.
Non-brand related keywords:
- the main keywords from your industry, in order to monitor if any subject arises, which you might need to approach in a press release or blog post (this is the way )
- the brand names of your main competitors
For these keywords monitoring only the best result would be sufficient.

In order to practice newsjacking you must keep your eyes and ears open for any topics, which have potential, outside of your industry.

Step Four - Act
All the monitoring in the world won't have any results if you don't act on it. Thus here are a couple of pointers:
* When it comes to bad comments, it goes without saying that you have to be tactful. You should analyze if the person who posted the particular bad remark is doing it to troll around. If yes, then do not answer. If you believe that he/she is not a troll, then answer politely. It is a good rule of thumb to never answer when you're angry. I've read it recently in an article (I'm so sorry I couldn't find it again, if you do know which one I'm talking about please let me know and I'll link to it), in which it was advised not to use your brand's name when responding to a complaint, especially when this is on a complaint site. Instead use generic wording like "the company". The reasoning behind this is that the more your brand name is mentioned on that particular page, the chances are higher for it to appear in the first SERs (Search Engine Results) for your brand name, which prospects will most likely search for when thinking of buying from you. So if you want to avoid bad impressions appearing on the first results for your brand name this is a great tip.
* Respond to the good tweets or comments that come up regarding your brand. You will probably not be able to answer all of them, but try to respond a couple in one monitoring session.
* If someone is asking a question regarding your field of expertise do not hesitate to answer, but remember that trying to sell your product/service at this point is a huge no-no.
* If someone is complaining about your competitor, be there for them (favorably, before your competitor can respond to the complaint :) )
* If a topic comes up that could be a great subject for a blog post or press release, forward it to the person responsible. If someone has a problem that Customer Support can handle, forward it to them and so on.
* If a competitor launches a new feature or product, you might consider forwarding the press release to your Product Manager.

In any case the greatest advice that you probably already heard is to act human and listen to your instincts. Think about it this way: if someone said or asked something, how would you have reacted, if you would have been there in person?

In case you are saying to yourself "This looks like a lot of wrok, Csilla. I don't have the time for this". Remember: with the right tools all this can be done in 15 minutes a day and the benefits are definitely worth it :)

Did you monitor the web until now? What's the biggest success you had from it? Do you know of any other tools that can help in the monitoring process? I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic.

Are your fans getting notifications from your Facebook Page?

There has been a lot of anger from online marketers regarding Facebook's EdgeRank change, especially because this happened coincidentally about the time Facebook launched its Promoted Posts. These modifications caused the reduction of reach for the updates posted by Business Pages (in any case for some businesses). Off course, Facebook "issued" a response for all the negative feedback it received, one of which being a magical place called "Pages Feed", where a user can find all the posts that come from the business pages they liked (which by the way is nowhere to be seen in the Facebook mobile app). I won't discuss the "efficiency" of this move from the perspective of businesses (have you even noticed the tab before I mentioned it?), but I do want to discuss a feature that might help in reaching the attention of your Facebook fans.

You actually might have heard this before from blog posts like this on AllFacebook.com, as after the big change many posts flourished advising you to do this and that in order to maintain or even increase the reach of your Facebook posts.

So, what am I talking about? Well, if the title didn't tip you off (wink), I'm referring to the option of users getting notifications from your business page(s). What I found a little bit strange is that after the initial rush in November 2012, nobody really talked about it (please correct me if i'm wrong here). Honestly, this feature didn't really work uptil the last couple of days, at least not for me. I enabled it in November for one of the pages I like and only yesterday I received the first notification regarding the activity on the page.

In any case, the question remains: Are your fans getting notifications from your Facebook Page?

Well, there are mainly 2 steps in achieving this:

1. Create an awesome page and share great content that your fan base can relate to and wants to interact with. I know that this is more easy to say than done, but with a lot of listening, experimenting and measuring, which will lead to really knowing your customers, you will eventually get there. Why is this important you ask? Well, apart from the obvious reasons, you have to keep in mind that users usually like tens of pages, and if they opt-in to get notifications from each of them their notification box (or whatever it's called) will eventually overflood and the whole purpose of the feature will be lost anyway. So, the most probable scenario is that they will enable this option for the pages they really like. In such a case, your page will be included on the list if it provides true value. Although you have to keep in mind that the probability of inundating their notification box still remains, but at least until this goes mainstream, you can reap the benefits from it.

2. Ask them to enable the option of getting notifications from your page and show them how. After earning their interest, you have to educate them. Besides notifying them that this option exists (one time might not be enough, but do not overdo it though) you have to show them the steps they have to take in order to achieve this. And of course, ask them nicely with cream and cherry on top :)


I'm curious: if you did enable this option in the past, did it work for you immediately? What are your thoughts on this?

What 2012 meant for Online Marketing

Looking back at all the changes that took place in 2012, I can say with certainty that 2012 was a great year for Online Marketing. And I'm not just affirming this because it was the first year which I spent entirely in this industry or because the Mayans launched the "2012 Apocalypse" marketing campaign :) (which I really enjoyed), but because a great number of industry updates shaped how we will do online marketing in 2013.

Below are the major modifications (in no specific order) that I believe will have an impact on the industry at least for the upcoming year:

1. Google Authorship. I wanted to list this first because it is my personal favorite and it shows Google's attempt to model its search engine algorithm after how we trusted information in the "real world before Google". What I mean is that we all trust what experts in certain fields tell us regarding particular topics, right? And even if the majority of us often don't remember their names, we all remember faces. In any case AuthorRank will have somewhat of an impact on SEO as well, because AuthorRank will be 2013's PageRank. I found this article on SEOMoz particularly interesting on this subject.

2. Google Penguin. I believe you'll agree with me when I say that this Google update created a lot of fuss in the SEO world. Google's little black furry creature changed a lot of things in the line of Search Engine Optimization, which lead to increased focus on Content Marketing, especially in the second half of 2012. So I expect this trend to grow wings in more businesses in 2013.

3. Facebook IPO. Even if this is more a business decision than a product related update, Facebook being listed on the stock market gave birth to more than a couple of product changes, in order for the company to better monetarise its "social network". Sponsored Posts and the EdgeRank algorithm change, Global Pages, Facebook Nearby, the announcement of Video adds and so on are all the result of the company trying to get better quotations on the stock market. Some even speculate that the company will release Premium Facebook Pages in the near future. Although, I have to admit, as a user, I kind of like the Google updates I mentioned, but where Facebook is concerned the user really had to suffer from an experience point of view. So I wouldn't be amazed if users will emigrate to other social platforms, especially if Facebook keeps this up.

4. Google+ Local and the focus on local. I think we will see more changes from Google in this direction (especially because we are still waiting to be able to answer reviews as businesses - it would be about time). Additionally, local has got a big role when it comes to ranking in SERPs. And this takes us to the next item on the list ...

5. Mobile Marketing. The number of people owning a smartphone and using it to navigate the World Wide Web has skyrocketed and we started to see great marketing campaigns that integrated mobile. I hope to see more businesses having mobile-optimized sites and great apps in the upcoming year. If you want to get ideas in this direction, check out the MobilePlayBook, a great mobile guide with examples put together by Google. Apart from advice it has a couple of great examples of how businesses designed their mobile website or how they used apps successfully. Some are really creative.
Even though 2012 has been the year of mobile, 2013 will probably be the year of the tablet, so keep that in mind when you put together your marketing strategy for this year.

6. Search Plus Your World. Social is starting to be even more intertwined with SEO, and SPYW is definitely a sign of this. If you think about it, it does make sense, apart from the fact that a particular piece of content has been written by experts, the buzz it creates on social media platforms is another indicator of its quality. And in the end the AuthorRank is supposedly measured taking social signals in consideration as well. So, this fact adds to the pressure of having to be successful on social networking sites.

7. Focus on data. I left this for last, because every year there is more and more focus on data than in the previous one. Thus, 2012 brought the inclusion of the Social tab in Google Analytics, to help measure the ROI of social media marketing, together with focusing on conversion, instead of more mediocre metrics. In 2013 I hope to see more ways to measure multi-channel conversion, including offline touch points.

What are your thought on this list? Which change you like the most and which do you dislike entirely? Both from an user's and an online marketer's perspective? Do you think semantic search will have a significant evolution this year, I mean Google's Knowledge Graph is just the first droplet in the glass.